The present disclosure relates generally to displaying of documents, and more specifically, to controlling the display of a document, when the document comprises multiple columns.
Paper is becoming progressively obsolete. Companies in particular are trying to save money and resources by providing user manuals and other literature in a digital format rather than hard copy, and by making these versions available online. Despite this shift, the target media does not seem to change and as a result the digital copies are still formatted as if they were going to be printed. One specific example is that documents are still produced with multiple columns of text. The problem with this approach is that when reading the document in a digital format the scrolling provided by the application is not aware of the progression of text within the document and as a result the document is scrolled a screen at a time, rather than following the natural flow of the text. Owing to the same constraints, individuals are reluctant to print out the media to make this process easier and so the result is a lot of unnecessary scrolling to follow the flow of the text (for example at the bottom of one column of text, a reader might need to scroll up to begin reading the next column) A better solution to this problem is needed so that documents can maintain their design (often due to other constraints) but still maintain their readability.
An alternative approach is to remove all formatting to display the text without any columns at all. This approach has been implemented by Adobe PDF and has some limitations. For example, not all PDFs can be viewed in this way because of the way they were created and in addition any contextual information written in the document (such as “the image on the left”) is lost as part of the translation process.